Barcodes and other optical machine readable images are used extensively to represent information about an object. Decoding or reading a barcode is accomplished by translating the patterns of the barcode, such as bars and spaces in linear barcodes or blocks or other features in a 2D barcode, into the corresponding numbers or characters. Barcodes are widely used for encoding information and tracking purposes in retail, shipping and industrial settings. Barcodes and their uses are becoming more mainstream, however their uses remain mostly in providing static information about a particular product or service, or in recent years providing a static link to a website in relation to the product or service associated with the barcode.
For years, the merchant ordering and payment systems, and banking and payment processing in general, have been trying to engineer a transaction processing technology that is secure, efficient and easy to use, thereby facilitating the customers shopping and payment experience, both at point of sale (POS) terminals and for online shopping. In particular, providing the customer with some control in how their personal financial information is provided to the merchant has so far been elusive. This inability to involve more customer control of the transaction while at the same time streamlining the amount of time and information a customer must spend and provide during the product ordering and purchasing process has effectively relegated customer experience in product purchasing to that of yesterday rather than the future. In particular, the leveraging of current and future mobile technology capabilities to the product transaction market to predominantly the purchase of downloadable items such as ringtones and music. Barcodes have been used in an effort to speed up the customer experience by providing merchant terminals information about the product when scanned through a checkout scanner, i.e. the price and brief description of the product that the barcode is attached/applied to. However, any use of the barcode during the customer shopping experience, other than as a look up service for a price of a product on a product by product basis, is simply not available.
At the same time, developments in the field of mobile commerce are being facilitated by improved functionality and features available on mobile devices, and by such functionality and features becoming more commonplace on current mobile devices. For example, cell phones, smart phones and tablet computers nowadays are commonly integrated, multi-functional devices. In addition to their core, basic functionality, they will often have, or can be configured to have, web-enabled functionality, various other communication capabilities (e.g., e-mail, text, wi-fi, etc.), camera functions, scanning and graphical image handling functionalities and other capabilities. Graphical interfaces of desktop computers have also become more advanced in their functionality and provided features. However, to date the customer shopping experience during checkout (either in person or online) has not benefited from these advanced functionality and provided features of desktop GUIs and mobile devices.